Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the Two Fat Ladies and a former alcoholic, is more likely to carry a shotgun than a handbag. But, as Nigel Farndale discovers, she still cries easily

There is a bluntness to Clarissa Dickson Wright, which disarms as much as it disconcerts. She never “dislikes” things, she “hates” them: her father, oil seed rape, the welfare state. Gordon Brown is “that foul man”. And if you compliment her on the cheerfulness of her shirt, she will say dismissively: “It makes me look like a sofa.” Hesitate when trying to think of a polite way to refer to her weight, and she will finish your sentence for you: “You mean fat?”

It seems to be a form of defence, this confrontational style. But also perhaps a sign of her impatience with those she considers foolish, which is just about everybody. She has an alpha brain and a low and steady voice, with a delivery that is clipped and typical of her class. Her father was the Queen Mother’s surgeon, and she moved in aristocratic circles as a child. She still does, actually. As one of the most high-profile champions of field sports in the country, she is the darling of the landed gentry.

Her lack of compromise on this subject is reflected in the photograph on the jacket of her new book, Rifling Through My Drawers. She is carrying a shotgun and wearing plus fours. The book is a collection of anecdotes and political opinions, rather than a sequel to her best-selling memoir Spilling the Beans.

The beans she spilled in that book included an account of how her alcoholic father beat her as a child and how she, as a result, became such an alcoholic herself that she squandered her inheritance – the equivalent of around £15 million today – and would pretty much sleep with any man who would buy her a drink. She has been sober for 22 years now (she is 62), but seems to wear her past on her face: the broken veins, the unplucked hairs, the pale blue eyes that have out-stared the world. Complex and as tough as old boots, yes; one of life’s victims, no.

We are reminiscing about Jennifer Paterson, the other half of the BBC’s former Two Fat Ladies cookery show, whom I knew a little. “Jennifer was deeply eccentric,” she says. “Always positive. Spent a lot of time singing, which would drive me nuts. Her great joy was to try and stick in my brain some Noël Coward tune or other, and the minute it became unstuck she would sense it and start singing it again.”

They had a devoted following. Any groupies? “I don’t have the figure for it, but I remember when Jennifer and I were in Australia, I used to get left notes with people’s room numbers saying, ‘Come and see me.’ Jennifer thought this terribly funny. No one left them for her. Perhaps they thought I was more racy. I never took them up on it, but I did used to look through the crowd and think ‘Oooh, which one?'”

When Paterson died in 1999, anti-hunt protesters shouted at Dickson Wright: “One dead Fat Lady, one to go.” “It was the most awful thing because it wasn’t long after Jennifer died. I usually pay no attention to the bloody antis because they are so awful, but I thought that was plain vicious. Clearly they are sick people.”

She has received numerous death threats since. “They only stopped sending the written ones when I said on television that I was going to have an exhibition of them to raise money for the campaign for hunting. Special Branch have taken away the most unpleasant ones for their files. I remember at a book-signing the antis came and sprayed us with red paint and the queue was fantastic about it. They asked if they could have the books with the red paint on. And in Norwich, they mobbed us because the police cordon hadn’t worked. I just put my head down and went for the taxi. The antis were bouncing on the roof when we got in.”

Does she ever feel like retaliating? I mean, what if she was down a dark ally with one of them and she had a baseball bat in her hand? “Oh, I wouldn’t need a baseball bat. I once had two people attempt to mug me and they both ended up in intensive care. I can handle myself. The reason one doesn’t retaliate is that one doesn’t want to stoop to their level.”

You wonder if that story can be true, as you wonder about some of the more picaresque moments in her memoir. Her sister, with whom she has fallen out, has accused her of exaggerating her accounts of being beaten by her father. Still, her image of herself as a scrapper is revealing. Did she inherit her temper from her father? “Since I stopped drinking, it is a different sort of temper to his, but they don’t call me Krakatoa for nothing. I have an explosive temper which goes up and down. Everyone is left shuddering in the wake of it, and a minute later, when I’m calm again, I’m wondering why everyone is looking at me nervously. I suppose that’s why I never get depressed. Depression is the reverse side of anger. Anger internalised.” She cries easily though, she adds, “but not deeply. Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday will make me cry, or a soppy film. I cry from sentiment and anger, that is all.”

And she is not afraid of dying. “I would be quite happy to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland come the time. The thing is, if you are the sort of alcoholic that I was, death becomes an old friend. You never know which bottle is going to kill you and you stop being afraid of it.”

She felt no guilt about betraying her father in her memoirs. “I realised during recovery that if I could not forgive my father then I could never forgive myself, because I had become so like him in my drinking. Thank God I never had children to terrorise. I told the counsellor this and they did the gestalt [a therapy that uses role-play to resolve past conflicts]. I was so angry that they took all the furniture out of the room, apart from the chair I was sitting on.

“With the gestalt you try and summon up the image of the person you want to talk to. I could see my father there quite clearly, as if a photograph of him was projected on the back wall. To my amazement I said: ‘You poor, silly idiot, all we really wanted was to love you and have you love us.’ Where the f— did that come from? Excuse my French. After that, I burst into tears. I didn’t love him because there was nothing there to love.”

She became a barrister to spite her father – he hated lawyers – and at 21, having already graduated from UCL, she became the youngest woman ever to be called to the bar. A few years later she was disbarred because of her drinking. Earlier this month, Dickson Wright drew upon her legal background when she pleaded guilty to hare-coursing. Had she wanted to play the martyr?

“I don’t think an absolute discharge counts as martyrdom, my dear. But I would gladly go to prison for my convictions. It would be nice and peaceful and I could write a prison cookbook.”

I tell her that while I am in favour of a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting, I feel less comfortable about hare-coursing, in part because the pest-control argument doesn’t hold. It seems to be just about pleasure.

“Oh dearie me, what a puritan you must be. But they do need controlling, actually. Bear in mind that a hare eats 40lbs of vegetation a week. Death in the countryside is different to death in the town; it is part of the way of life. Farmers love and care for their livestock, then send them off for slaughter. All field-sports people are doing is turning an inevitable necessity into a pleasure. If the animal is going to be killed anyway, why not take pleasure in it? But I can see that is a matter of personal choice. Have you ever been hare-coursing?” I shake my head. “Then you can’t pass judgment on it.”

That can’t be right, surely. You can disapprove of homicide without having witnessed a murder. “Some murders are justified. If I had killed my father I would have been justified because of the way he behaved. But I don’t anthropomorphise. I don’t equate human life to animal life.”

It strikes me that the difference between Dickson Wright’s public and private personas is her serious-mindedness. Does she regret the way she deliberately made herself a figure of fun by agreeing to the title Two Fat Ladies? “No, because if you can make people laugh you can win arguments. I discovered that when I was a barrister. On the last big countryside march there was such good humour. A very British trait. There was also a sense of passion and resolve. As Chesterton said: ‘We are the people of England and we haven’t spoken yet.e_SSRq” She dabs her eyes. “Sorry, that poem always makes me cry …”

Her face clears. “That was an enjoyable chat,” she says. “I dare say when I read the article I shall hate you forever.”

He’s well-educated, handsome and impeccably connected. Then why is Dominic West so good at playing deeply flawed losers?

Before meeting Dominic West in a pub near his house in Shepherd’s Bush, I’m told by a publicist that the actor is tired of people only ever asking him about The Wire, the gritty, understated, critically acclaimed police drama set in Baltimore. Although “cult” must be one of the most overused and misused words in the arts world, it can be applied with some justification to this series, which ran from 2002-2008.

Its devotees are fanatical and there aren’t that many of them, considering the canonical status the series enjoys – it was aired on an obscure digital channel in this country and so, when word of mouth spread, most people watched the box set on DVD instead. West was its unlikely star – unlikely because his background is so very different from that of McNulty, the hard-drinking, womanising blue-collar American detective he played.

He is, after all, an Old Etonian, as well as a friend of Samantha Cameron.

He’s also married to an aristocrat, Catherine Fitzgerald. They met at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was reading English, but went their separate ways – she married Viscount Lambton, and he had a child with Polly Astor (granddaughter of Lady Astor). They met up again and had three children, all of whom came along to their wedding last year at Glin Castle, her family seat.

Given the baggage that must come with the OE label, you would think that if any subject were off limits, it would be that one. We will, of course, talk about The Wire, because it would be perverse not to – like interviewing Paul McCartney and avoiding The White Album. But for now, let us describe our man as he arrives on a bike wearing a baggy flat cap and an orange patterned scarf. He has just turned 42, and presumably the first thing casting directors notice about him is that he is tall, dark and handsome, though not in a conventional way – indeed, the words that keep cropping up whenever he is profiled are “simian” and “carnivorous grin”. He has teeth like “nutcrackers”, according to one critic. And to this descriptive mix are usually added “oaky voice”, “booming laugh” and “cut-glass vowels”.

But the first thing I notice about him is his beard. He grew it for his much-lauded role as Iago in Othello at the Sheffield Crucible, which has just finished its run. This followed another 1,000-line role in Simon Gray’s Butley in the West End. In that West played a lazy, drunken, extroverted don. He said at the time that he liked that role because it meant he got to be “monstrously camp” and “bitchy”. He has also been all over our television screens this year, having starred in the BBC series The Hour (a second series of which will start filming soon), as well as his chilling and utterly compelling portrayal of Fred West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult. On the big screen he is currently playing the baddy in Johnny English Reborn (a rare taste of critical disapproval for him this, but the critics didn’t stop it becoming number one at the box office) and he is about to appear opposite Rebecca Hall in The Awakening, an atmospheric story set in a Twenties country boarding school, loosely based on The Turn of the Screw.

West plays a wounded veteran of the First World War who is now working as a teacher. “There is an elegiac sadness to the film,” he says. “It plays with this idea that ghosts come out of grief. That they represent a human need to see people because so many had died in the war. The Twenties were a time of grief. People were living in the past because so many of their loved ones had recently died.” West’s grandfather fought at the Somme. “He got injured. Lived a long and happy life in Sheffield. He was an industrialist. We’ve got his medals and his hat. But the best research I found for understanding that period was the poetry. That was the medium of the First World War.” We talk about ghosts and I say that, annoyingly, the film gave me goose bumps – annoying because I don’t believe in ghosts. Does he? “I’m not a rationalist like you. I like to believe there are ghosts all over the place! The country house we filmed in had a lot of history. Several members of the same family had killed themselves there. The son shot himself and I was constantly trying to find that room.”

So he enjoys scaring the bejesus out of himself? “We’re drawn to that which frightens us,” he says. “Morbid curiosity. It’s the reason I like playing evil people like Iago or Fred West. We are fascinated by them.” But at least Iago is fictional. What was most disturbing about his Fred West was his normality. He seemed so matter of fact in the way he talked about his deeds. Worse, he seemed quite vulnerable and almost sympathetic. “My words were almost entirely taken from the transcripts, apart from some of his worst excesses. Everything I did was what I heard on those tapes. There was no acting involved, really. I suppose the psychopath in him meant that he looked to the appropriate adult for cues, because he had no idea what the social convention was on this. He had no understanding of what was thought to be shocking. For him, sweeping up leaves and leaving them in the garden was no different to chopping up his daughter and leaving her there.” In an interview at the time it was screened, he admitted he understood the dark sexual fantasies of West. “This is very, very dangerous territory,” he said. “But necessarily, one has something in common.”

“It got pretty dark,” he now says. “I was having bad dreams about it. It was filmed quite quickly, though, so I could come home and be with my kids and take my mind off it. I realised researching him that anyone who goes near that man, be they a biographer or actor or a relation of the victims, becomes tainted – you’re changed by him in a malign way. It’s extraordinary the power of people like that, they go on after their death. I don’t know whether you would call it charisma, exactly, but he was a lovable rogue, like Iago. Not very intelligent, but likeable and quite charming in his jack-the-laddish way.”

What was really freaky about that performance was that he looked and sounded just like Fred West, even down to the Gloucester accent. “Actually, I thought no one would buy it. But I am hyper self-critical.” I liked the way he kept chewing on his cheek. “Did I? I think that was the fake teeth which gave me even more of a monkey mouth, like his. It helped having a mouthful of too many teeth.” Meeting him in person, I realise that the cheek chewing wasn’t acting. He does it in real life, too.

Dominic West was born in Sheffield, one of seven children. His father made his fortune by manufacturing vandal-proof bus shelters. He played Iago with a Yorkshire accent. How did that go down in Sheffield? “They liked it, but I dare say there were some asking why I was doing it in a Yorkshire accent, asking if I thought Yorkshire sounded evil. But it was the opposite. Yorkshire sounds honest. Everyone calls him honest Iago. He couldn’t do what he did if people didn’t find him honest.” Of all the accents West has nailed, Yorkshire must have been the easiest.

“Yes, because that was the accent with which I used to speak. It also has its dangers, because it comes too easily to me.” What was extraordinary about the pitch-perfect Baltimore accent he adopted for The Wire was that people there had no idea he was an Englishman, though West says he found it a very hard accent to pull off. As part of his research for that role, he spent weeks shadowing real Baltimore cops as they patrolled the ghettos. Must have been an eye opener, that. “I remember my first day standing next to this guy who had been shot eight times and was still alive and his family were standing around him and I was hoping to God they wouldn’t ask me a question. I felt quite uncomfortable, because I was an actor from London. An impostor. Generally when things got exciting, I was excluded – I couldn’t go on drugs raids, for example – but I think it was just as important to learn about the boring stuff, because that is the main part of a cop’s working life.”

Can his friend David Cameron learn any lessons from The Wire about tackling the drug problem here? “Legalise it, you mean? Legalising it was one of the radical ideas we explored in The Wire, as a way of dealing with all the health issues. If you want a radical solution, that’s the way to do it, but it hasn’t been tried yet in real-life Baltimore. I think the writers thought the drug war was a waste of money and lives and that the drug dealers should be run out of town.”

Here’s a name drop, I say. I was round at Ian McEwan’s house not long ago, and I noticed there was no television. Did our Greatest Living Novelist disapprove, I asked? He did have one, he said, but he only used it like a cinema, for watching DVDs. And what was he watching at the moment? The Wire. “Was he?” says West. “That’s great. I think a lot of people did that because when they watched the box set it was quite novelistic, each episode like a chapter. Had it not been for the box set, I don’t think it would have been watched much at all.” What does he make of the fanaticism of the fans? “I do get the feeling from the people who come up to me that they feel like they are members of a secret club. The initiation to this club was sitting through 17 hours of quite impenetrable material. The harder they had to work, the bigger the pay off.”

West was most adept at acting drunk in Butley. And in The Wire too, possibly because he sometimes enjoyed the odd Scotch during filming. And, such is his conscientiousness, his “research” seems to have carried over into Iago – offstage, at least. “With Iago, I would come offstage and go on drinking,” he tells me. What, even when he had a performance the next night? “Yes. Of course. We’d go crazy. You don’t get hangovers because you’re running around so much and sweating so much. Physically, it was demanding for a 42-year-old git like me.” He’s known to like a drink, but now his run has finished I guess it doesn’t matter if he lets his hair down. “I’m in the first week of my holiday and adoring it,” he says. “But by the third week, I’ll be getting a bit antsy. We’re going to Spain tomorrow, then I’m going paragliding with my friends, and then I’m hoping to see the Dalai Lama, because I’ve been doing some work with Free Tibet. We’re flying into Dharamsala from Bir.”

I tell him my pet theory about 42 being the age at which people are reaching their creative peak at the moment: the scriptwriter Abi Morgan? 42. Professor Brian Cox? 42. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters? 42. “I’m part of this group, you mean? Well, it would be nice to think so. If you spoke to my wife, she would say the success can be dated to me going out with her! But yes, certainly over the past five years. I suppose you get to a time in life where your peers are the people in charge, they are the people about whom books are written and TV documentaries made. They are ‘your time’.” Especially in his case, having been at school with Boris Johnson and David Cameron. “Well, yes, they were older than me, but not by much, so we were near contemporaries. I knew Boris’s brothers well.”

Any memories of Dave he’d like to share? “I wasn’t aware of him at school much, would see him around a bit, but it was Sam I knew better. My good friend Nick was deeply in love with her and resented her going out with this guy Dave. That was really how I got to know him.” Is it true she’s a secret Labour voter? “Really? Why do you say that?” Ed Vaizey MP said she voted Labour in 1997. “That’s hilarious. I can imagine she might because she doesn’t want her husband to be prime minister, though I’m sure she’s delighted he became it. I imagine she would rather have her life back. But I don’t know if she’s a Labour supporter. I doubt it, somehow. He’s very convincing in his arguments.” He chews his cheek. “I think this coalition suits Cameron well because he doesn’t have to pander to his right wing, the Lib Dems keep that in check. He can occupy the middle ground.” West has two sons. Would he consider sending them to Eton, given that in the past he has said he was miserable there? “Yes, I would. It’s an extraordinary place. When I first went there I was desperate not to become what I thought an Etonian was: a soft southerner. It was very much a north-south thing. But it did very quickly nurture my acting. It has the facilities and the excellence of teaching and it will find what you’re good at and nurture it.”

I imagine he, like David Cameron, would rather not carry the label around with him. “I don’t think it will have won Dave any votes. It certainly hasn’t won me any parts. The other day, Newsnight Review was talking about Othello and it came up in five seconds. I thought, ‘Eton is more than half my lifetime ago’. So yes, there is a stigma, and not a benign one. But I do think everyone has to overcome other people’s perceptions of them. Clarke [Peters, who played Othello and was West’s co-star in The Wire] says he gets it with ‘black actor’ but I think there is a political will not to do that now. Old Etonian is attached to my name at every opportunity to explain what? I don’t know. Why I am such an a——-?” The booming laugh again. He doesn’t really think he is one, and I’m inclined to agree.